Abstract

The Coop Himmelblau partnership of Wolf D Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky has, since the 1960s, been engaged in the attempt to break away from mainstream approaches to architectural design and production. Originally contemporaries of Archigram, Pichler and Kiesler, Coop Himmelblau’s manifestos for architecture have, since that time portrayed a growing preoccupation with feed-back mechanisms, with looping, folding and the attempt to recast architecture as metaphorically chaotic. While there have been extensive critical analyses of Coop Himmelblau’s early post-Vitruvian, or anti-humanist, propositions their approach to design in the late 1980s and early 1990s has rarely been considered in such detail. Throughout this latter period the rhetoric of Coop Himmelblau has been reliant upon a vocabulary of “interference”, “chaos”, “indeterminacy”, “iteration” and “open systems”; all terms that at that time were in common use in science and geometry. The present paper undertakes an analysis of the possible connection between the process of architectural design and the science of nonlinear dynamics in the rhetoric of Coop Himmelblau. The focus of the paper is Coop Himmelblau’s celebration of the original design impulse or instance—what they call the psychogram—and its interpretation by Michael Sorkin as a reference to scientific complexity.

Keywords

design theory, design process, design tools, creative design

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Nov 1st, 12:00 AM

Privileging the Sketch: Coop Himmelblau, Nonlinear Dynamics and the Psychogram

The Coop Himmelblau partnership of Wolf D Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky has, since the 1960s, been engaged in the attempt to break away from mainstream approaches to architectural design and production. Originally contemporaries of Archigram, Pichler and Kiesler, Coop Himmelblau’s manifestos for architecture have, since that time portrayed a growing preoccupation with feed-back mechanisms, with looping, folding and the attempt to recast architecture as metaphorically chaotic. While there have been extensive critical analyses of Coop Himmelblau’s early post-Vitruvian, or anti-humanist, propositions their approach to design in the late 1980s and early 1990s has rarely been considered in such detail. Throughout this latter period the rhetoric of Coop Himmelblau has been reliant upon a vocabulary of “interference”, “chaos”, “indeterminacy”, “iteration” and “open systems”; all terms that at that time were in common use in science and geometry. The present paper undertakes an analysis of the possible connection between the process of architectural design and the science of nonlinear dynamics in the rhetoric of Coop Himmelblau. The focus of the paper is Coop Himmelblau’s celebration of the original design impulse or instance—what they call the psychogram—and its interpretation by Michael Sorkin as a reference to scientific complexity.

 

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